Joburg is the one your mother warned you about. She's pierced, tattooed, laughs too loud, and drinks and smokes too much. While most cities seduce you with their subtle charms, Jozi just knocks you on the head and drags you in. After two holidays in South Africa, I decided to pack up my life in suburban Atlanta and move to Cape Town. I had only planned to pass through Johannesburg on my way south, but 21 years later I'm still here. Jozi must have slipped something into my drink when I wasn't looking. How else could I have fallen for an ill-tempered wild child with such a bad reputation? But love her I do. And I'm not alone. Millions from around the world have fallen under her spell, all the way back to the city's founding in 1886.

Joburg was born from a sudden lust for gold, entirely unplanned and hundreds of miles from any viable water source. For beneath her lie the world's largest gold reserves, a 300km arc producing more than 40,000 tons (1.5-billion ounces) of bling - accounting for nearly half the gold ever mined on earth.

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Thousands of thrill-seekers, fortune-hunters, swindlers, merchants, bureaucrats, clergymen and prostitutes came to coo over her golden cradle. Unlike in other New World cities, left to develop unique traits over centuries, every member of Joburg's somewhat dysfunctional family - including her ruling class and underclass, criminals and police, as well as her Christian, Jewish, Muslim and agnostic aunts and uncles - arrived on the same day.

As an instant city, Johannesburg has always been a place of immigrants. Being half-Italian and half-Croatian, I fit in perfectly. In the northern suburbs the first-generation immigrant stock among whites - Greek, Jewish, Italian, Portuguese, Lebanese - easily outnumber Dutch- and German-descended Afrikaners. And the dawn of democracy in South Africa in 1994, combined with the Yugoslav civil war and the fall of the Berlin Wall, created a second-generation influx of Eastern Europeans, as well as Chinese, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Thais, not to mention other Africans. It's a mix that's unique on the continent. Almost overnight, a new Chinatown has taken root in the previously Jewish suburb of Cyrildene; and the high street of what has traditionally been Joburg's Little Italy, Orange Grove, has become Little Nigeria.

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The full spectrum of the city's ethnic and religious diversity can be experienced by driving north along the M1 motorway. At the crest of the ridge leading into the suburban basin, the six spires of the temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appear on the right, followed by the Houghton Masjid, St Jerome's Croatian Catholic church, the Greek Orthodox Christian church of the Pantanassa, the Great Park synagogue, the Lebanese Maronite Catholic church, St Sergius Russian Orthodox church and the Nizamiye Turkish Masjid - all in a 15-minute drive.

If there was little planning involved in Joburg's birth, even less was applied to her development. Pathways between shanties became horse trails before becoming roads, then motorways. Town planning was in place, but practical micro logic always prevailed over a macro grand master plan. 'Johannesburg's city centre has been rebuilt four times in less than a century,' says 33-year-old Joburg-born architect and dapper man-about-town Brian McKechnie who, while still based in the suburbs, has snapped up a city-centre apartment in the historic Ansteys Building, keeping a firm eye on the future. 'The first round of development was tin shacks and tents, followed by the Transvaal Republic vernacular, then the British Empire style and, later, Art Deco. The last - the post-war skyscraper boom - still stands, and we're now left with a very well-preserved 1970s-era city centre, which is unique.

The city developed like an onion, quickly expanding outwards in all directions, ring by ring. They say 10 years in Joburg is like a half-century in other cities. Previously fashionable suburbs have simply been discarded like abandoned outfits on a teen's date night. With each passing decade the expansion continued, and now the area contained within its city limits is larger than that of Los Angeles, although the sprawl, which might otherwise seem overwhelming, is softened by dozens of village-like suburbs centered on high streets.

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This place has a decidedly American vibe. But again, rather than reading her script, Jozi has improvised, developing a New York brain and a Los Angeles body. So while the shiny-new California-style sprawl is in place - shopping malls, housing estates, townships and office parks, complete with palm trees, all connected by impressive new motorways and rapid rail systems - there's also a tangible coating of rust-belt grittiness that permeates the city.

Until very recently, that grittiness was particularly noticeable around Joburg's inner-city core, where property prices had plummeted after big businesses moved out to the northern suburbs. 'Rock bottom came around the year 2000,' says Sharon Lewis of the Johannesburg Development Agency. 'From that point onwards, it became official policy to intervene and upgrade the infrastructure while brokering strategic property deals.' As a result, the agency developed new icons for the city, including the Nelson Mandela Bridge (completed in 2003), Constitution Hill and Newtown (from 2001 onwards), paving the way for private developers to reinvest.

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Saldanha Bay mussels at The Leopard restaurant

David Crookes

The nip-and-tuck approach is working. Forward-thinking young property developers saw promising gaps in the abandoned city centre. Jonathan Liebmann created Maboneng, a hip live-work-play district carved out of the industrial eastern fringe; and Adam Levy began the redevelopment of the Braamfontein district. Galleries, cafés, one-off retailers, studios and restaurants have all sprung up, seemingly overnight. Joburgers are notoriously cynical, but even its hardest-to-impress citizens are taking note.

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Researching a story on the city centre's regeneration in 2010, I met the team behind South Point, a property-development company whose core business is providing housing to nearly 5,000 university students in revamped 1950s office blocks. I found myself infected by the urban-regeneration bug. A few months later I joined the company, still creating stories - but now out of bricks and mortar. And it's a fast-paced tale: in 2010 there were only one or two places to buy a cappuccino in Braamfontein; now there are seven independent coffee bars, including two roasteries, in just one block, all doing a roaring trade as international government organisations, creative industries and retailers increasingly return to the area.

For the first time since the city's founding, Joburgers are beginning to reinhabit places they've previously abandoned, seeking relief from what the city's creative class calls 'mall fatigue'. Says McKechnie, 'Anyone younger than 40 who grew up in suburban Joburg has probably grown up in a shopping mall. Joburg was always a car-based city, but there's an entire generation who've never crossed a four-lane street on foot and don't know how to parallel park. Back in the 1970s, the first mega-malls might have been new and interesting to our parents. That was such a turbulent time in South Africa, I think they sought a sense of order and comfort in the malls. Not so for us. There's such a blandness and sameness about them. In the northern suburbs you'll find a lot of architecture driven by fake history and reality-aversion, places that are meant to make you feel like you're in Old World Europe, when in fact they've only been there six months. Younger, more forward-looking people are starting to appreciate the city centre, seeking out authentic experiences, architecture and neighbourhoods.'

Now suburbanites flock to inner-city food markets in their thousands every weekend - on Saturdays to Braamfontein's Neighbourgoods Market, on Sundays to Market On Main in Maboneng. For many young Joburgers these markets have provided their first taste of street life without climate control. The pace of change is mind-boggling. The first wave, driven by pierced and tattooed youth culture, was quickly followed by a second wave of fashion-forward parents pushing babies in Italian prams, who are now supplemented by camera-swinging, small-town and fringe-suburb visitors riding the third wave. Trendoids and grannies sit side by side tucking into Jewish nosh at Maboneng's Eat Your Heart Out café, under an oversized map of Johannesburg with the street names reimagined in Hebrew. On the other side of town, in Braamfontein, Puma launched its South African flagship two years ago - the first international brand to open a stand-alone store on a Joburg city-centre street - and was quickly followed by the flagship premises of Virgin Mobile and the L'Oréal Institute, with more big names set to follow.

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The city's cultural scene is also exploding, with the rise of annual events involving previously marginalised communities: Chinese New Year and Diwali, for instance, and the Portuguese Lusito Land festival. 'We're entering a period of cultural reawakening,' says Neil Dundas of the ground-breaking Goodman Gallery, which represents an impressive stable of internationally collectable contemporary South African artists such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Kendell Geers, Mikhael Subotzky, Sam Nhlengethwa and David Koloane. 'The city's established cultural calendar is being reinvented and new cultural arenas are opening up, like the annual Joburg Art Fair, which has grown tremendously. The photographic exhibition Rise and Fall of Apartheid at Museum Africa last year was co-curated by Okwui Enwezor (who's also the curator of this year's VeniceBiennale and the first African-born person to take on that role in the art event's 100-year history). More than a thousand people attended the opening night party, which was hosted in the streets before moving into the museum - something that would have been unthinkable even two or three years back. The Wits Art Museum is the new face on the block, known for its collection of contemporary South African art, and home to the most important collection of traditional sub-equatorial African art on the continent.'

Neighbourgoods Market

David Crookes

Chilean-born gallery owner Ricardo Fornoni moved to Johannesburg from London in 2004, opening the Res Gallery in the leafy northern suburb of Parkwood three years later. 'It was a very disparate art scene, controlled by a handful of galleries, when I first arrived,' he says. 'Since then there's been a renaissance of sorts, with all these little galleries popping up everywhere. Now you can find 20 in a relatively small area. The market itself is still quite small, but it's growing as the smaller spaces seem to have made the scene more accessible to a younger crowd, and there's a lot more action taking place.'

Joburg has always had a lively theatre scene, dating back to the long-defunct Theatre Royal, which opened shortly after the city's founding. The past decade has seen new theatres opening, including the Teatro at Montecasino and The Lyric, and the reopening of the Alexander Theatre, rounding out the mix of dozens of performance spaces and theatre complexes. The state-of-the-art Soweto Theatre opened in Jabulani two years ago, adding another 420 seats to the city's estimated tally of about 17,000, and the historic Market Theatre in Newtown is getting a £6million refit.

When I first arrived in 1992, I'd hang out in Rosebank, a compact and tree-lined suburb known for its galleries, interiors shops and restaurants. It was home to Cranks, Joburg's only Thai restaurant; Cinema Nouveau, the city's only venue dedicated to art films; and the Brazilian, a coffee bar famed for its conveyer-belt delivery of cappuccinos. If I walked into the Brazilian on any given Thursday night I would bump into a dozen mates. Now I am hard-pressed to bump into anyone I know more than once or twice a year, as restaurants and bars are appearing in dozens of instant suburbs that never existed in the early 1990s. The rebirth of the inner city has countered this, providing a centralised, human-scaled touch point for Joburg - where Sandton, quite literally, meets Soweto, and often for the first time.

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Another new area where people are connecting is the charity fundraising circuit, where Joburgers give the Big Rich Texas girls a run for their money. Joburg is unique on the African continent in that it's a self-funding city, with philanthropy running through its veins. Giving back is part of its psyche. There's a fundraiser almost every night, bringing in cash for organisations concerned with an exhaustive list of societal issues - children and gender, environment and wildlife, arts and culture, education and health. A recent Monday-night launch for a Dutch-driven HIV initiative, Orange Babies South Africa, saw the 79-year-old Zimbabwean jazz legend Dorothy Masuka share the stage with 36-year-old Brussels-born Afrikaans rock queen Karen Zoid. The full spectrum of Joburg's air-kiss brigade - fashion, big business, sport, theatre - turned out in full force, partying until 1am.

'Work is work and play time is play time, and we play very well,' says Tselane Tambo, daughter of anti-apartheid icons Oliver and Adelaide Tambo. She moved to Johannesburg from London, and now works as a fundraiser for the Adelaide Tambo School for disabled children in White City, Soweto. 'When I first arrived, I found it a lot slower than London. I found it quiet. But now, although it still feels suburban, it's suburbia with an adrenalin rush.'

The cultural scene is exploding, with the rise of events involving previously marginalised groups

Since coming to Johannesburg 20 years ago, 36-year-old Bulgarian-born filmmaker and actor Stanimir Stoykov has pumped out eight films, with a ninth in production. Like Baltimore's John Waters and Madrid's Pedro Almodóvar in their early days, Stoykov self-funds, cajoling a potent mix of celebrities and underground drag queens into working for free. Joburg has always served as the bad-girl backdrop for his below-the-radar films, including Lesbian Braai, Me Kutch Ne Karongi (I Don't Mind) and Fanny. 'Joburg is integral to my work, and there's a lot of talent here,' says Stoykov. 'It's a rebel town. I shoot everywhere without permits. We even shot a scene at the airport, where we had an actor impersonating Britney Spears arriving in South Africa. And we just shot it, with a biiiiiig camera! You can imagine. But no one blinked an eye.'

'Joburg is the cultural heart of South Africa,' says Tamara Dey, lead singer of dance band Flash Republic, who also stars in Stoykov's latest film, Spotlight Terror, about a pop star who kills her competition. 'Young people are flocking back to the inner city, fearlessly. It's full of possibilities if you're creative, free-spirited and adventurous. Joburg's got a lot of heart, with a non-stop clash of cultures and energy - and young people are tapping into it. Joburg is the future.'

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Where to stay

Four Seasons Hotel The Westcliff: Joburg is a decidedly business-focused kind of town, so its relatively tepid hotel scene has been stirred - and somewhat shaken - by this month's arrival of the first Four Seasons in South Africa. The former Westcliff Hotel has been entirely remodelled as a 117-room urban resort. Duality is key, appealing to work and play. For business travellers, the interiors have a calming, neutral feel; those with more time on their hands will pick up on beautiful details such as hand-embroidered cushions, custom-made animal-print fabric and an outstanding collection of South African contemporary art. Five restaurants, a destination spa, meeting rooms and a fitness centre round out the big-city mix. 67 Jan Smuts Avenue, Westcliff (www.fourseasons.com). Doubles from about £275Saxon Hotel, Villas and Spa: The smartest place to stay in town for more than a decade, it is now being given a run for its money by the Four Seasons. It's still the serene hideway it always was, with an Aman-in-Africa vibe set in undulating parkland. A real treat. 36 Saxon Road, Sandhurst (www.saxon.co.za). Doubles from about £280Hyatt Regency Johannesburg: A sleek hotel in a great location for car-phobics, in the heart of one of the city's best walking districts. 191 Oxford Road, Rosebank (johannesburg.regency.hyatt.com). Doubles from about £17533 Melville Road: Owner-run, three-room, Afro-chic place in one of Johannesburg's most exclusive suburbs, with a dedicated chef and chauffeur. Cossetting and intimate. 33 Melville Road, Hyde Park (www.33melvilleroad.co.za). Doubles from about £17054 on Bath: The former, much respected Grace Hotel is directly connected to the Rosebank Mall. Recently bought by Tsogo Sun hotels, it has been entirely reinvented. 54 Bath Avenue, Rosebank (www.tsogosunhotels.com). Doubles from about £210The Satyagraha House: This is where Mahatma Gandhi lived a century ago. Now a museum and seven-room guesthouse, it's a deeply affecting place and totally unique. Worth a visit, even if you're not staying here. 15 Pine Road, Orchards (www.satyagrahahouse.com). Doubles from about £100

Wall art at D6 restaurant in Emmarentia

David Crookes

Where to eat

La Cucina di Ciro: This is one of Joburg's top Italian restaurants, run by old-school chef-patron Ciro Molinaro. 43 Seventh Avenue, Parktown North (www.lacucinadiciro.co.za). About £40 for twoThe Grillhouse: Previously noted by this magazine as one of the world's top 15 steak restaurants, this is where big business does big deals over big slabs of meat. The Firs, corner Oxford Road and Biermann Avenue, Rosebank (www.thegrillhouse.co.za). About £45 for twoThe Leopard: Innovative cooking from fun-loving author and chef-patron Andrea Burgener. 63A Fourth Avenue, Melville (www.leopardfoodcompany.com). About £30 for twoCube Tasting Kitchen: Intimate 30-seater, serving 10-course meals. 17 Fourth Avenue, Parktown North (www.cubekitchen.co.za). About £80 for twoMarket On Main: The Sunday food and design market has everything from Argentine asado to Ethiopian coffee. 264 Fox Street, MabonengNeighbourgoods Market: Sister to the Cape Town original, this is a terrific spot on Saturdays. 73 Juta Street, Braamfontein

What to see

Map of Johannesburg, South Africa

Maggie Li

Maropeng: Explore the origins of our species at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, an hour's drive from the city. Within the site is a contemporary art space, the Nirox Sculpture Park. www.maropeng.co.zaMuseum of African Design - MOAD: This new pan-African museum is the first of its kind in the continent. 281 Commissioner Street, Maboneng (www.moadjhb.com)Wits Art Museum: Modern South African paintings and sculptures, and an unrivalled collection of sub-equatorial art. University Corner, corner Bertha and Jorissen streets, Braamfontein (www.wits.ac.za)Joburg Theatre: This multi-stage performance complex, including the Nelson Mandela Theatre, puts on a mix of musicals, drama, comedy, concerts and dance; it's home to the Joburg Ballet. Loveday Street, Braamfontein (www.joburgtheatre.com)The Market Theatre: A Johannesburg institution in the 1913 Indian Fruit Market, known for its positioning as South Africa's definitive anti-apartheid 'struggle theatre'. Corner Bree and Miriam Makeba streets, Newtown (www.markettheatre.co.za)Soweto Theatre: A beautifully designed arts complex with outdoor performance space. Opened in 2012 as part of the Jabulani area's rapid development. Corner Bolani Road and Bolani Link, Jabulani, Soweto (+27 11 930 7461)Teatro at Montecasino: The place for big-budget concerts, dance recitals and West End and Broadway shows. Montecasino Boulevard, corner William Nicol Drive and Witkoppen Road, Fourways (www.montecasino.co.za)Bassline: Known for its street-cred, this live music venue has two stages: a 1,000-capacity concert hall and a more intimate 150-seater performance space. 10 Henry Nxumalo Street, Newtown (www.bassline.co.za)The Orbit: Joburg's newest all-jazz music venue, with free lunchtime jam sessions by Wits University music students. 81 De Korte Street, Braamfontein (www.theorbit.co.za)

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This feature was first published in Condé Nast Traveller February 2015